Friday was a PBDD-intensive day (Partners Bridging the Digital Divide – a nonprofit where I’m the Vice-president of communications.) It makes me realize I’m juggling three different types of writing ‘jobs’: my writing, Fermilab, PBDD. I like being busy, which is good, because at times one of them seems to have an endless need. Which one varies. I try to give them all some time, especially my writing since I’m in the midst of outlining my novel for November, and need to stay focused to get a good middle figured out.
I finished tweaking the first book in the series, and updated both the paperback and Kindle versions. Book two is in the public queue at CritiqueCircle.com, and in a private queue, so I get feedback weekly on the current chapter – I’m ¾ of the way through posting chapters, and I get critiques on early or later chapters by the people who are reading it in the private queue. I can still find stuff to improve, but am trying to get input from other people as well.
In glancing over a stack of books my daughter was returning to France, I found one that has common French phrases. Exactly what I needed to help differentiate the speech of my French POV character from my American POV character. It’s tricky because I don’t want to use a lot of actual French. The French characters are actually speaking French to each other, but since the book is in English, the words are English. I can have the English-speaking people use an occasional French word, but I dislike books that pepper the English with another language.
Work has been busy, with a lot of writing stuff, which I like. It’s actually a good balance to have paid writing, volunteer writing and my writing. I like it.